Lightning Squiggled Across The Sky!

I’d always thought if you wanted to describe how lightning moved across the sky, ‘zigzagged’ would be a good word – until last Friday.

Illustrations of storms usually show jagged, sharp-lined streaks of light, often forked but generally straight and I’d assumed that was actually what lightning was like.

Squiggly Lightning

There had been such a terrific storm over my house during the early hours of Friday, it was like someone had repeatedly turned the bedroom light on and off but at 3.00am, it’s hard to find the enthusiasm to get out of bed and to take photos, so I was pleased when another storm started at about 9.00pm. Standing on steps, propping your camera out of the attic window isn’t easy and trying to hold it steady while taking long exposures was tricky too, but I was quite pleased with the results – and surprised too. The lightning was sometimes sharp and straight but at other times, it seemed to meander randomly, doubling back on itself. More of a squiggle than a zigzag.

Perhaps it was because I used a long exposure on my camera. Does anyone know?

The second storm wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as the first one, which I spoke about here in ‘Chaos Stirred With a Stick’ but it was still pretty spectacular. If you want to know why I called the post ‘Chaos Stirred With a Stick’, it’s because this is a phrase used by Daffodil’s gran (and probably lots of other people too) in ‘Daffodil and the Thin Place’. If you’d like to find out what was chaos stirred with a stick, you can find out more about the ebook here.